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Socio-spatial legibility, discipline, and gentrification through favela upgrading in Rio de Janeiro
Abstract
This paper contributes to global perspectives on gentrification by interrogating the experiences of urban redevelopment and transformation in the global South. Through unpacking the contradictions of public space revitalization and upgrading in two favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we critically examine changes to the socio-spatial fabric of informal settlements over time. Our analysis reveals that upgrading projects, when combined with state-led favela pacification, create socio-spatial legibility through three inter-related pathways of physical, symbolic, and economic discipline. In the outset, favela upgrading increases property prices and produces an urban scenario molded for outsiders while simultaneously invisibilizing traditional cultural and social uses. For favela residents, however, upgrading is experienced as iterative processes of securitization and restriction, which involve strategies such as environmental clean-up, property enclosure, police violence, and new exclusionary forms of investments. As a result, the most socially vulnerable residents are controlled, coercively driven away, and slowly erased. Over time, the apparent integration of the formal and informal city, of the rich and the poor, of the ‘asphalt’ and the ‘hill’ in Rio de Janeiro produces new forms of separation, segregation, and fragmentation.
... Segundo o programa oficial, os moradores das favelas que receberiam a UPP teriam a garantia de seus direitos básicos com a chegada de serviços públicos (sendo a segurança um deles) e com o atendimento de suas demandas sociais, assim como desenvolvimento econômico a partir da ocupação policial. Diferentemente dos programas Favela-Bairro e Morar Carioca, com vieses nitidamente físico-espaciais, a UPP se apropriou do discurso da integração socioespacial da favela ao seu entorno apoiando-se na segurança pública, alegando que a pacificação abriria caminhos para projetos de urbanização, fornecimento e regularização de serviços (Decreto N° 42.787, 2011 Estudos sobre a implementação da UPP nas favelas cariocas têm focado, principalmente, nas dimensões sociais, políticas e econômicas dos impactos da securitização (Fahlberg & Vicino, 2016), abordando a ressignificação simbólica dos territórios populares pelo mercado (Lacerda, 2016) ou discutindo o conceito de gentrificação aplicado nas favelas da Zona Sul carioca (Comelli, Anguelovski & Chu, 2018;Cummings, 2015). No entanto, faltam estudos que articulem a implementação da UPP a alterações do espaço físico e das práticas sociais na favela, de forma a auxiliar na compreensão de novas dinâmicas geradas dentro da lógica da produção do espaço informal. ...
... A urbanização de favelas não se restringe a melhorias construtivas, estando também relacionada aos efeitos da promoção de securitização e policiamento local, além dos investimentos econômicos em turismo e mercado imobiliário (Comelli, Anguelovski & Chu, 2018), como é o caso das UPPs. Nesse processo, a paisagem cultural da favela passa a ser valorizada por meio da apropriação de suas características colocadas como "autênticas" através da ressignificação simbólica dos atributos da favela, como é o caso do Vidigal (Lacerda, 2016), gerando um debate sobre o processo de gentrificação em favelas e a adaptação desse conceito ao cenário do Sul Global (Cummings, 2015). ...
... O processo de turistificação do Vidigal está relacionado a um processo global de transformação da favela enquanto destino turístico, dentro do ramo do turismo de realidade (Freire-Medeiros, 2009). A paisagem cultural da favela passou a ser valorizada a partir da apropriação de suas características enquanto autenticidade, contudo, o discurso da autenticidade da favela é contraditório, uma vez que os elementos autênticos da favela que atraíam visitantes, novos moradores e investidores foram ressignificados para a adequação aos interesses de mercado em um processo dialético de criação de novas legibilidades e destruição de práticas e valores locais, processo percebido em outras favelas que receberam o programa (Comelli, Anguelovski & Chu, 2018). ...
The article seeks to understand how sociopolitical strategies, which do not directly intervene in the physical space, imply a reordering of the built environment along with transforma-tions of local social practices. The socio-spatial transformation processes triggered by the Pacification Police Unit (UPP) im-plementation in the Vidigal favela, in Rio de Janeiro city, are analyzed as a case study to review how the policy reinforces (or not) social exclusion and spatial segmentation dynamics to which the favelas have historically been subjected, identifying its ongoing consequences. Methodologically, this qualitative research is based on field observation, interviews (open and semi-structured), mental maps drawn up by residents, and official documents analysis to understand the physical-social conjuncture of Vidigal before and after the UPP. A cross-check-ing of information allowed the recognition of new qualitative values given to space objects, as well as the incorporation of new agents, elements and values from the arrival of the UPP. In general, ongoing processes of real estate valuation, commodifi-cation of the landscape, turistification, emergence of new social control devices of the residents, attraction of a new consumer market and social changes in the community were perceived.
... We included a direct association between segregation and homicides to emphasize that there is a strong relationship between them (Comelli, Anguelovski and Chu, 2018;Cufré, 2019). However, there are several multi-step paths that can be taken between our exposure variable and the outcome. ...
... Urban land use is limited by availability, affected by public housing policies, and subject to housing market pressures that may lead to gentrification and displacement (Comelli, Anguelovski and Chu, 2018). Homicides rates may increase as low-income populations experience Note: Regions are abbreviated as: South (s); Southeast (se); North (n); Northeast (ne) and Midwest (cw). ...
... Segregated urban areas create vulnerability for young people to prejudice and fear, and may increase engagement in illegal activities those resulting in violence. Such spatial patterns contribute to the increase of violent interpersonal and group conflicts in Brazil, mainly in favelas characterized, generally, as areas of risk often with disputed control by the militia, gangs, and criminal factions (Comelli, Anguelovski and Chu, 2018). Segregation contributes to the degradation of spaces and the lack of physical, economic, and social infrastructure. ...
This paper investigates the associations of income segregation with homicide mortality across 152 cities in Brazil. Despite GDP increases, an important proportion of the Brazilian population experiences poverty and extreme poverty. Segregation refers to the way that different groups are located in space based on their socioeconomic status, with groups defined based on education, unemployment, race, age, or income levels. As a measure of segregation, the dissimilarity index showed that overall, it would be necessary to relocate 29.7% of urban low-income families to make the spatial distribution of income homogeneous. For the ten most segregated cities, relocation of more than 37% of families would be necessary. Using negative binomial models, we found a positive association between segregation and homicides for Brazilian cities: one standard deviation higher segregation index was associated with a 50% higher homicide rate when we analyze all the socioeconomic context. Income segregation is potentially an important determinant of homicides, and should be considered in setting public policies.
... Davis, 2016;Koonings and Kruijt, 2007;Moser and Rodgers, 2012), it is only recently that the dialectics between space and securitisation have begun to take centre stage (e.g. Comelli et al., 2018;Jenss, 2019). This is particularly relevant given the historical links between urban space and citizenship claims in LAC, which reflect changes in state-society relations. ...
... This combination of order and assistance can be interpreted as a modified version of Wacquant's penal-assistential mesh, applied in a typical peri-urban municipality affected by weak institutions, corruption and insecurity. This case presents a watered-down version of strategies seen in other cities such as Bogota´, Rio de Janeiro and Recife with more professionalised bureaucracies and robust budgets (Comelli et al., 2018;Hoelscher and Nussio, 2016;Hunt, 2012). Nevertheless, it shows how smaller municipalities with lower capacities and budgets are equally susceptible to the discourse of securitisation, with consequences for residents which are more complex and insidious than the simple militarisation of security. ...
In the context of growing concern with violence in Latin American and Caribbean cities this paper offers an analytical synthesis of urban securitisation which involves the construction of issues, spaces and populations as security threats. The synthesis contributes to debates on urban studies and critical security studies, which focus on neoliberalism as the driver of urban securitisation and militarisation as its main expression, by highlighting the embedded, contextualised and historically situated nature of securitisation and its multiple manifestations. The paper proposes a framework for the socio-spatial analysis of securitisation processes focusing on their causes, manifestations and consequences, while capturing their dialectic relation with cities’ spatial characteristics. Bringing together Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the social production of space with Wacquant’s analysis of the penal-assistential state, and using secondary sources complemented by primary data from our research, the paper shows that urban securitisation in this region is contingent to four socio-spatial dimensions common to Latin American and Caribbean cities – segregation, territorial stigmatisation, overlapping insecurities and territorial struggles. Using a multidimensional framework, the paper illustrates how unaddressed legacies of colonialism and notions of state power in the context of struggles with criminal actors have driven urban securitisation and diversified its targets and techniques beyond militarisation. Under a securitising logic, programmes which often appear progressive are also shown to prejudice marginalised groups and undermine democratic values. The paper concludes with a call for further multidisciplinary analyses that account for the socio-spatial and historical particularities of contemporary forms of urban securitisation in this and other regions.
... Extant scholarship establishes that the price of land is equally or more dominant than racial relations in determining the territorial distribution of social strata, in contrast to the US (Segura, 2014, p. 14-15;Katzman, 2001). Frequent violent displacements are legitimized by the overlaps of formal and informal tenure (Comelli et al., 2018). In consequence, racial urban politics are not a sufficient explanation; the specificities of competitiveness are necessary for understanding experiences of contemporary urban crises. ...
... Public-private strategies of competitiveness both fragment and enclose, homogenize and disrupt everyday urban practices, and they change which localities and spaces become part of the cognitive maps of social strata (Comelli et al., 2018). Perceiving the zócalo as a new inner-city boundary (Jenss, 2019), upper-class Oaxacans increasingly paint the city's southern part as potentially dangerous, and have retreated towards the North, prominently, the Reforma neighbourhood with upmarket restaurants and shopping, and San Felipe, which offers upper-class housing. ...
This contribution asks how urban inhabitants (trans)form their everyday practices in the face of insecurity in Neoliberal Urbanism. Based on the analysis of interviews conducted in the Southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, which has seen enormous rises in property prices, short-term rentals, and numbers of tourists, I argue that urban dwellers adapt to asymmetrical manifestations of insecurity through care networks and adapted mobilities, and such everyday practices sometimes turn into more collective, political practices. By combining feminist perspectives on everyday practices in austerity, relational geographies, and work on everyday responses to insecurity, I develop the notion of “everyday scalar politics’ to offer a relational reading of city-dwellers’ practices in the competitive city. The concept highlights that those not participating in formal governance decisions, do enact political agency, and reach beyond their neighbourhood and the local state, unsettling assumptions of passivity.
... Desde la década de los 90 hay mayor interés en la gentrificación (Atkinson, 2012;Clark, 2005;Lees et al., 2013;Ley & Yang, 2017;Zuk et al., 2018), y en Latinoamérica en la última década (Delgadillo et al., 2015;Inzulza-Contardo, 2012;Janoschka et al., 2014;López-Morales et al., 2016;Rasse et al., 2019). Los estudios se asocian con inversión pública o proyectos urbanos (Nogueira, 2019;Perlman & Delgadillo, 2019) y algunos abordan su relación con intervenciones en áreas de origen informal, con discursos de 'pacificación' (Comelli et al., 2018;Martí-Costa et al., 2016) o 'embellecimiento' (Cummings, 2015). En Medellín, Colombia, evidencian el desplazamiento por cuenta de intervenciones en que buscan convertir la ciudad en una gran empresa a través del marketing social (Velásquez, 2012, p. 76) o la construcción de infraestructuras para la 'recuperación ambiental' como el Cinturón Verde (Anguelovski et al., 2019). ...
... Recientes análisis sobre gentrificación en barrios informales estudian proyectos para eventos urbanos (Gaffney, 2016;Nogueira, 2019;Orueta & Fainstein, 2008;Perlman & Delgadillo, 2019), así como programas de mejoramiento con discursos de 'pacificación' (Comelli et al., 2018;Martí-Costa et al., 2016;Velásquez, 2012) o 'embellecimiento' (Cummings, 2015) que indicen en el proceso. Algunos, se refieren a la gentrificación ambiental, evidencia de la compleja relación entre sostenibilidad, justicia territorial y derecho a la ciudad, en contextos de informalidad, desigualdad social, vulnerabilidad, riesgos ambientales y cambio climático (Anguelovski, 2018). ...
Resumen Desde los años 50, el gobierno de Bogotá implementa acciones de Mejoramiento Integral de Barrios (MIB) en áreas de origen informal, que inician con su reconocimiento y legalización. Aunque el objetivo del MIB es mejorar la calidad de vida, paradójicamente, los barrios legalizados en localizaciones estratégicas están en riesgo de gentrificación y desplazamiento, aumentando la informalidad y segregación en la ciudad. Esta paradoja configura el dilema del MIB. Los estudios de la última década sobre desplazamiento residencial asociado a la gentrificación en Latinoamérica resaltan el papel del Estado en estos procesos, pero pocos cuestionan la gestión del MIB. Para estudiar este dilema, combino técnicas etnográficas con análisis espaciales que permiten observar la incidencia de las acciones del MIB en el desplazamiento de los residentes de Los Olivos, un barrio legalizado en 1996, en la localidad de Chapinero de Bogotá. Los resultados revelan las fallas de i) la dimensión política del MIB y sus consecuencias, tanto en ii) la dimensión espacial, con altas tasas de desplazamiento hacia otros barrios informales periféricos de Bogotá, como en iii) la dimensión social, que afectan la apropiación barrial, la cohesión y el capital social. Las recomendaciones de este documento buscan fortalecer el MIB como política de planificación urbana que garantice la inclusión y el derecho a la ciudad. Palabras clave: Mejoramiento Integral de Barrios (MIB), gentrificación, desplazamiento residencial, derecho a la ciudad. * Trabajo de grado para optar por el título de Magister en Estudios Interdisciplinarios Sobre Desarrollo. Concentración en Gestión Territorial-Profundización.
... The slum dwellers, due to low investment in basic infrastructure, were able to protect themselves from the real estate pressures that cities were facing [8]. Moreover, this movement gave housing in these places the historical status of illegal, making the environment even less sensitive to market and government actions. ...
... As shown in Table 1, the terms used as keywords in the search, together with smart cities, compose the quantitative statistics of articles used in this work. [3,5,6,8,9,11,16,20,24,30,33,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45]47] ...
Smart cities are a natural evolution of the concept of sustainable cities. These cities can be analyzed by social, economic, environmental, and technological biases. For this work, we chose the social and economic vision, with a special focus on the poorest and most vulnerable territories of Brazilian cities. These territories in Brazil are called slums, places of poverty but with opportunities for the development of the creative economy with its own brand. Seen by many in a simplistic way, summed up to be geographic spaces of drug circulation dominated by trafficking, Brazilian favelas have been consolidating themselves as a storehouse of innovative minds, a creative territory with multiple and complex cultures. These places today are capable of producing a positive image with potential for market exploitation. Therefore, the objective was to draw a relationship between the creative economy, branding and favelas, considering the concept of smart cities that include products and services from the slums. The present study shows the results of a survey and a bibliographic analysis based on the methodology Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) and with parameters that took into account the favela, branding and the creative economy. Thus, we expect that it will be possible to point out ways to accelerate entrepreneurial actions and foster the development of these locations.
... The slum dwellers, due to low investment in basic infrastructure, were able to protect themselves from the real estate pressures that cities were facing [8]. Moreover, this movement gave housing in these places the historical status of illegal, making the environment even less sensitive to market and government actions. ...
... As shown in Table 1, the terms used as keywords in the search, together with smart cities, compose the quantitative statistics of articles used in this work. [3,5,6,8,9,11,16,20,24,30,33,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45]47] ...
Smart cities are a natural evolution of the concept of sustainable cities. These cities can be analyzed by social, economic, environmental, and technological biases. For this work, we chose the social and economic vision, with a special focus on the poorest and most vulnerable territories of Brazilian cities. These territories in Brazil are called slums, places of poverty but with opportunities for the development of the creative economy with its own brand. Seen by many in a simplistic way, summed up to be geographic spaces of drug circulation dominated by trafficking, Brazilian favelas have been consolidating themselves as a storehouse of innovative minds, a creative territory with multiple and complex cultures. These places today are capable of producing a positive image with potential for market exploitation. Therefore, the objective was to draw a relationship between the
creative economy, branding and favelas, considering the concept of smart cities that include products and services from the slums. The present study shows the results of a survey and a bibliographic analysis based on the methodology Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and MetaAnalyses (PRISMA) and with parameters that took into account the favela, branding and the creative economy. Thus, we expect that it will be possible to point out ways to accelerate entrepreneurial actions and foster the development of these locations.
Keywords: slum; creative economy; branding; local development; smart cities
... Similarly, scholars express concerns about infrastructure standards, as well as sufficient cost-recovery on investments (Atuesta & Soares, 2018;Gulyani & Bassett, 2007). And, much like MH projects, there are concerns about who benefits (Bredenoord & van Lindert, 2010;Verma, 2000): upgrading may result in changes to social structures within informal settlements, potentially contributing to gentrification and displacement of tenants and highly vulnerable residents (Comelli, Anguelovski, & Chu, 2018;Davis, 2006). ...
... In formalization projects, residents often prioritize remaining in their homes and communities Williamson, 2018). Yet, a consistent challenge for existing policies is the lack of long-term affordability, security, and stability (Bredenoord & van Lindert, 2010;Comelli, Anguelovski, & Chu, 2018;Varley, 2017;Verma, 2000). The CLT's emphasis on permanent affordability and homeownership responds more directly to resident priorities, as demonstrated by CMP-CLT . ...
Informality has been a predominant source of affordable housing for the urban poor in the Global South. Despite many efforts to eliminate and/or improve informal settlements, these communities still prevail as one of the only housing options for low-income households burdened by exclusion, dispossession, and stigma. This article evaluates the potential for and impediments to community land trusts (CLTs) as an alternative response to informality. We compare the CLT model to predominant policy responses to informality to understand it strengths and weaknesses. Based on this analysis, we propose a conceptual framework delineating the main conditions necessary to implement the CLT model within informal settlements in the Global South. This framework informs the work of communities, governments, practitioners, and researchers pursuing an alternative response to housing informality. This study expands the existing understanding about CLTs and their possibilities for application in the Global South.
... En ellas, la histórica estigmatización de las favelas ha servido para justificar el despliegue de políticas de pacificación con el objetivo de mercantilizar los territorios en que se asientan. Al respecto, es interesante observar cómo las lógicas de desposesión del espacio urbano transforman los paisajes humanos, simbólicos y materiales en concordancia con los imperativos de ciudad globalizada y cosmopolita (Broudehoux & Carvalhaes, 2017;Comelli et al., 2018;Germany & Richmond, 2020;Labbé et al., 2016). El enfoque innovador radica en que la gentrificación no solo es observada como proceso económico-político. ...
El artículo analiza el concepto de estigmatización territorial con el objetivo de desarrollar un marco analítico para entender mejor este fenómeno desde una perspectiva latinoamericana. A pesar de la emergente producción empírica sobre estigmatización territorial en Latinoamérica, aún resulta incipiente, en comparación con la extensa literatura anglosajona. Por ello, este artículo responde a esta brecha en el conocimiento y brinda una revisión de los debates producidos en Latinoamérica durante las últimas dos décadas. Así, se desprenden dos premisas. Por un lado, se resalta la estigmatización territorial como una expresión de la marginalidad urbana bajo el neoliberalismo. Por el otro, a pesar del contexto de marginalidad, se propone que las subjetividades de los estigmatizados se volvieron congruentes con los principios neoliberales de la economía, generando fronteras simbólicas al interior de sus barrios.
... Considering that a significant proportion of slum residents in Lagos are tenants [44], they are at the mercy of landlords who prefer to replace them with relatively better middle-class residents offering to pay higher rents or sell their lands to private developers. Ref. [122] observed a similar case in Rio, where the introduction of amenities to favelas led to increased rents and the stimulation of gentrification, which induced the displacement of previous favela residents. ...
There have been increasing calls in gentrification studies to examine the geography of gentrification in slums, as little is known about the patterns and processes of slum gentrification, especially in sub-Saharan African cities where slums house over 50% of the urban population. This study explored the spatiotemporal changes in slums in Lagos, Nigeria, between 1984 and 20 on the pattern and drivers of gentrification. Data were collected from 42 slums in Lagos through remote sensing (1984–2020) and a field survey (2020–2021). The study integrated geospatial analysis with quantitative and qualitative analysis to investigate the patterns and drivers of gentrification in Lagos slums. The findings show that between 1984 and 2020, all the sampled slums had undergone gentrification processes, apart from those that were completely cleared. However, many slums continue to have deprived areas as they continue to gentrify. Almost all the slum communities have experienced slum clearance in the past. Additionally, the current and new housing developments in the study have favored middle- to high-income groups, which has led to the displacement of previous slum residents. The study identified slum clearance, fires and floodings, the presence of palaces in the community, the proportion of deprived areas in 1984, government interest in the slum, and the size of the church as drivers of slum gentrification processes in Lagos. Finally, the findings show that the vulnerability of slum dwellers increases with slum gentrification. Therefore, this study recommended developing policies and programs, such as sustainable relocation and low-cost housing, to mitigate the negative consequences of slum gentrification, especially in cities with significant shares of low-income groups.
... Even though policies intended inclusion of the favelas within the wider (urban) constellation, these policies prompted processes of gentrification, cost of living inflation and new waves of exclusion (Perlman, 2016). Thus, State-led orderings produced new forms of segregation and discipline while making invisible other social uses of space (Comelli et al., 2018). ...
This PhD thesis aims to explain the extent to which tourists’ practices and performances can become enmeshed with the production or reproduction of slummed spaces and communities. Throughout the research, we reflect on whether tourism could be an avenue to legitimise marginalised people and places at various scales in the broader society of the Global urban South. We examined tourism's structuring and shaping effects over marginalised places and communities to find that tourist practices do not always work in favour of slums’ cultural legitimization and empowerment but for legitimising neoliberal development, control and fiscalization processes.
We frame this investigation within Non-representational Theories (Thrift, 1996; 2008), or rather, more-than-representational ones. This post-structuralist group of theories, concepts, ideas and methods emphasise the agency of the moving and sentient body and the lack of hierarchy between humans and non-human things and centres the analysis on how hybrid actors interact, coexist and affect each other to produce realities and make sense of the world. Applying NRT to slum tourism’s studies entails departing from symbolic traces of meaning, branding or myth creations of slums and instead urges to follow tourists' embodied practices enacted on space and the consequent relations interwoven with other people, spaces, objects, and ideas, to create different versions of the tourist slum. Within these processes, we argue that tourists have agency in co-creating meanings that can potentially value slums’ spaces and culture and provide slum dwellers with new values and power.
The dissertation explores the case of tourist favela Santa Marta in Rio de Janeiro, which has been one of the most visited slums in that city since the early 1990s. We use three methodological approaches to analyse tourists’ valorisation and legitimisation processes. First, we elaborate an autoethnographic account, which analyses the researcher’s personal experience to draw on the issues and actors at play during favela tours. Second, we recreate two actor-networks interwoven after two antagonistic tours in Santa Marta to trace how socio-material realities are produced and consumed. Lastly, we undertake a discourse analysis of media articles, for which we propose three legitimation categories to analyse contested discourses within favela tourism.
... However, different forms of spatial devaluation and spatial cleansing allow the extraction of landed economic profit with violent and racist means comparable to those seen in Canada until recently but exerted against the urban population as a global trend. In many cities of the world, there are particularly violent forms of ethnic and class oppression motivated by land capitalization, like the favela redevelopment in Brazil (Comelli et al., 2018) or Israel/ Palestine (Shmaryahu-Yeshurun, 2022) or gentrification's several stages in China (He, 2019). ...
... For a person to function in an environment and be successful, the environment should be understood. Reciprocally, it is necessary for the environment to be compatible and legible to achieve that goal (Comelli et al., 2018). The past experiences of the person, the frequency of use and the type of the experience of the space are effective on the sense of place and preferences (Tuan, 1974;Relph, 1976;Rowles, 1983;Stedman, 2006). ...
TO CITE: Köseoğlu, E. and Yılmaz, E. (2023). Examining the Interaction of Perceived Legibility and Sense of Familiarity in the Streets of Hasköy, Beyoğlu. Lokum Journal of Art and Design, 1(1), 13-25.
Abstract
Perception is a personal experience and is often influenced by the gender, age, educational attainment as well as the experience and environmental factors they experience, as far as the scene is concerned with the image. Familiarity concept is considered related to legibility by some urban designers. The experience of the person and the frequency of use of the space, the legible identity of the space helps people to feel safe in the place where they are. This situation also affects positively the sense of space and its preferences, making it easier for the person to recognize the space and find direction. In this study, the concepts of legibility and familiarity of the first and third graders of civil engineering were explored in terms of how they interpreted and perceived a space and the differences that may arise in perception of space. Work has been done with 46 people were first-year students, 46 students were third-year students. The study area was determined as Beyoğlu, Hasköy District. In the study, questionnaires were applied to the students using 6 different street images and semantic differentiation scales obtained from 4 different street textures selected within the boundaries of Hasköy. In the evaluation of the questionnaires, frequency analysis, independent sampling t-test and correlation analysis were used. As a result of the analyses, it was seen that there was a significant difference in the way that civil engineering first and third graders perceived the streets. It is seen that there is a high correlation between legibility and familiarity as a result of correlation analysis. Third-year students perceived the place to be more legible than first-year students, but the influence of familiarity was also found in the formation of this difference.
... Yet ideas of pristine nature and wilderness are mostly built on privileged white ideas of what nature is and should be, ignoring, for example, the legacy of oppression and violence against African American people in forests and other green spaces (Finney 2014). Beyond the United States, the idea of a manicured and formal nature for higher-income visitors and residents that exemplifies racialized exclusion from new green infrastructure can be seen in urban upgrading schemes in Rio de Janeiro (Comelli, Anguelovski, and Chu 2018) or in risk prevention and climate-adaptive green infrastructure in Medellin (Anguelovski, Irazábal-Zurita, and Connolly 2019b). Some policy approaches have been adopted to redress racially and ethnically exclusive urbanization histories and patterns. ...
This book uses a unique typology of ten core drivers of injustice to explore and question common assumptions around what urban sustainability means, how it can be implemented, and how it is manifested in or driven by urban interventions that hinge on claims of sustainability.
Aligned with critical environmental justice studies, the book highlights the contradictions of urban sustainability in relation to justice. It argues that urban neighbourhoods cannot be greener, more sustainable and liveable unless their communities are strengthened by the protection of the right to housing, public space, infrastructure and healthy amenities. Linked to the individual drivers, ten short empirical case studies from across Europe and North America provide a systematic analysis of research, policy and practice conducted under urban sustainability agendas in cities such as Barcelona, Glasgow, Athens, Boston and Montréal, and show how social and environmental justice is, or is not, being taken into account. By doing so, the book uncovers the risks of continuing urban sustainability agendas while ignoring, and therefore perpetuating, systemic drivers of inequity and injustice operating within and outside of the city.
Accessibly written for students in urban studies, critical geography and planning, this is a useful and analytical synthesis of issues relating to urban sustainability, environmental and social justice.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003221425, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Funded by Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Table of Contents
Driver 1: Material and Livelihood Inequalities
Driver 2: Racialized or Ethnically Exclusionary Urbanization
Driver 3: Uneven Urban and Intensification and Regeneration
Driver 4: Uneven Environmental Health and Pollution Patterns
Driver 5: Exclusive Access to the Benefits of Urban Sustainability Infrastructure
Driver 6: Unfit Institutional Structures
Driver 7: Weakened Civil Society
Driver 8: Limited Citizen Participation
Driver 9: Power-Knowledge Asymmetries
Driver 10: The Growth Imperative and Neoliberal Urbanism
The book is fully open access here: https://www.routledge.com/Injustice-in-Urban-Sustainability-Ten-Core-Drivers/Kotsila-Anguelovski-Garcia-Lamarca-Sekulova/p/book/9781032117621
... Yet ideas of pristine nature and wilderness are mostly built on privileged white ideas of what nature is and should be, ignoring, for example, the legacy of oppression and violence against African American people in forests and other green spaces (Finney 2014). Beyond the United States, the idea of a manicured and formal nature for higher-income visitors and residents that exemplifies racialized exclusion from new green infrastructure can be seen in urban upgrading schemes in Rio de Janeiro (Comelli, Anguelovski, and Chu 2018) or in risk prevention and climate-adaptive green infrastructure in Medellin (Anguelovski, Irazábal-Zurita, and Connolly 2019b). Some policy approaches have been adopted to redress racially and ethnically exclusive urbanization histories and patterns. ...
... Even though policies intended inclusion of the favelas within the wider (urban) constellation, these policies prompted processes of gentrification, cost of living inflation and new waves of exclusion (Perlman, 2016). Thus, State-led orderings produced new forms of segregation and discipline, while making invisible other social uses of space (Comelli et al., 2018). ...
This paper examines the multiple and heterogeneous, current and potential, relations between hybrid actors of tourism in Favela Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro. It seeks to elucidate the legitimizing potential of tourists acting as "connectors" that reach beyond formal politics' hindrances. This work applies assemblage theory epistemological framework, and Actor-Network Theory ethnomethodological tools, to explore the issues and roles questioned, altered, made visible, or transformed through favela tourists' practices and performances. Hence, avoiding the ethical dilemmas and representational concerns from slum tourism researchers in the past. Our fieldwork engages with two favela tours. We follow tourists as they stitch hybrid actor-networks that create multiple orderings in such assemblages, and their material and semiotic configurations. Our research reveals that such tours could be related to different shifts in the favela's political, social, economic, cultural, and material dimensions.
... Desde sua implantação a política da UPP foi controversa e ambígua (Franco, 2014), com denúncias de abusos. Também existem relatos de que a UPP, ao controlar as atividades nos espaços públicos, passou a privilegiar eventos e empreendimentos voltados para o turismo, enquanto as atividades tradicionais e locais dos moradores passaram a ser proibidas ou menos estimuladas, podendo ser incluídos os bailes funk (Comelli, Anguelovski & Chu, 2018). Por outro lado, dados estatísticos mostram uma redução significativa da violência nos territórios de favela onde há UPP, especialmente durante seus primeiros anos de existência (Burgos et al., 2011). ...
A realização dos eventos esportivos como a Copa do Mundo de 2014 e os Jogos Olímpicos de 2016 propiciaram grandes investimentos em obras na cidade, também em diversas favelas. A implantação de política de segurança com as Unidades de Política Pacificadora (UPPs) e grandes obras de mobilidade urbana foram fundamentais para o desenvolvimento do turismo nessas áreas. Ao lado de iniciativas que estimularam o turismo de base comunitária algumas favelas da Zona Sul carioca se tornaram palco dessas atividades, com visitação e hospedagem. Exemplos nas favelas Santa Marta e Cantagalo-Pavão-Pavãozinho mostram a importância da atuação governamental para o turismo em favelas. Dessa maneira o fim das UPPs e o fechamento ou mau funcionamento dos equipamentos de mobilidade urbana trazem dúvidas sobre a viabilidade do turismo em favelas
The hosting of sports events such as the 2014 World Football Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games produced a sizeable flow of investments in the city, including some favelas. The implementing of a security policy that implemented the UPPs - Peace Police Corps - and major work aimed at improving urban mobility were fundamental actions to foster the development of tourism in these areas. As a result of the initiatives that sought to stimulate community-based tourism, some slums in Rio’s South End became the stage for a number of activities that included visitation and accommodation offerings. Examples on the Santa Marta and Cantagalo-Pavão-Pavãozinho communities show the importance of public actions to stimulate tourism in the favelas. As a result, as the UPPs were closed and many of the urban mobility equipment shut down, many doubts were cast on the feasibility and continuity of tourism activities in Rio’s favelas
... Many green injustices are indeed reproduced and exercised within neighborhoods and on residents in a racialized and violent manner under the hegemony of color-blind advanced green capitalism and neoliberalism (Melamed 2006;Hardy, Milligan, and Heynen 2017). In Rio de Janeiro, for instance, the green upgrading of favelas is experienced by residents as iterative processes of securitization and restriction, which involve strategies such as environmental cleanup, public and green space redevelopment, property enclosure, and police violence that eventually control, coercively drive away, and erase Afro-Brazilians (Comelli, Anguelovski, and Chu 2018). ...
Supported by a large body of scholarship, it is increasingly orthodox practice for cities to deploy urban greening interventions to address diverse socioenvironmental challenges, from protecting urban ecosystems to enhancing built environments and climate resilience or improving health outcomes. In this article, we expand the theoretical boundaries used to challenge this growing orthodoxy by laying out a nuanced framework that advances critical urban environmental justice scholarship. Beginning from the now well-supported assumption that urban greening is a deeply political project often framed by technocratic principles and promotional claims that this project will result in more just and prosperous cities, we identify existing contributions and limits when examining urban green inequities through the traditional lenses of distributional, recognition, and procedural justice. We then advocate for and lay out a different analytical framework for analyzing justice in urban greening. We argue that new research must uncover how persistent domination and subordination prevent green interventions from becoming an emancipatory antisubordination, intersectional, and relational project that considers the needs, identities, and everyday lives of marginalized groups. Finally, we illustrate our framework’s usefulness by applying it to the analysis of urban residents’ (lack of) access to urban greening and by operationalizing it for two different planning and policy domains: (1) greening for well-being, care, and health and (2) greening for recreation and play. This final analysis serves to provide critical questions and strategies that can hopefully guide new urban green planning and practice approaches.
This collection of interventions unites academics hailing from Latin America, the Middle East, Europe and the United States, reintroducing discussions on authoritarian state tactics and coercion into urban renewal dialogues within urban studies. During our discussions, it became apparent that urban authoritarian tactics are crucial in contemporary state‐led gentrification efforts. In this introduction to the series, we aim to merge research on authoritarian measures within neoliberalism with the literature concerning urban transformation and gentrification. By doing so, we bring urban studies into wider discussions regarding the overarching trend of authoritarianism on a global scale within sociology, political economy and international studies.
In both North and South, urban renewal and integration policies testify to the growing commodification of popular territories. The scientific literature emphasizes the processes of gentrification and population displacement associated with these dynamics, and questions the violent production of urban space primarily through the actions of the state and private developers. Shedding light on a blind spot in this discussion, this article proposes to study the forms of violence and commodification operating in the informal circuits of urban production and carried out by other actors, by studying an emerging figure in urban production in Latin America: illegal armed groups. In light of the recent capture of the informal land market by criminal organizations in Medellín, the article analyzes how land rights are distributed, legitimized or contested at the local level. We argue that the control of armed groups translates into the violent implementation of land predation that redefines forms of land valorization, access to land, and dwelling in popular neighborhoods, thus establishing predatory accumulation as the matrix of urban production.
Au Nord comme au Sud, les politiques de rénovation et d’intégration urbaine témoignent de la marchandisation croissante des territoires populaires. La littérature scientifique insiste sur les processus de gentrification et de déplacements de population associés à ces dynamiques, et interroge alors la production violente de l’espace urbain essentiellement à travers l’action de l’Etat et des promoteurs privés. Eclairant une zone d’ombre de cette discussion, cet article propose d’étudier les formes de violence et de mise en marché opérant dans les circuits informels de la production urbaine et portées par d’autres acteurs, à travers une figure émergente des marchés fonciers et immobiliers en Amérique latine : les groupes armés illégaux. À l’aune de la capture récente du marché foncier informel par les organisations criminelles de Medellín, l’article analyse la manière dont les droits fonciers sont distribués, légitimés, ou contestés à l’échelle locale. Nous soutenons que le contrôle des groupes armés se traduit par la mise en œuvre violente d’une prédation foncière qui redéfinit les formes de valorisation foncière, d’accès à la terre, et d’habiter dans les quartiers populaires, faisant de l’accumulation prédatrice une matrice de la production urbaine.
While studies of property rights have long gone beyond the legal-illegal dichotomy, how to quantify the varying degree of property rights remains a challenging task. Focusing on a special type of informal housing—Small Property Right Housing (SPRH) in China, this study examines how planning intervention affects the pricing mechanism of SPRH through the theoretical lens of graded property rights. A previous study has unravelled the pricing mechanism of SPRH by quantifying the impact of informal institutions inherent to the SPRH market that give different “price tags” to varying degree of property rights, while not being able to capture the impact of external interventions. Drawing on two SPRH datasets before and after a Master Plan of urban villages conservation announced in 2019, we employ difference in difference (DID) estimations to examine how planning intervention affects SPRH prices by way of altering the strength of informal property rights. We also develop spatial error models (SEM) to account for spatial autocorrelation. This research extends and enriches the robust conceptualisation of graded degree of informal property rights by capturing the changes caused by external intervention to offer a dynamic and more accurate understanding of SPRH pricing mechanism. It also demonstrates that planning can go beyond sanctioning and redlining to tolerate and steer informal development.
In this article I analyze the participation of economic patrons or gamonales in processes of city building. Like clientelistic leaders, local ‘big men’ can partake in the transformation of the living conditions of the urban poor. These individuals show an extraordinary capacity for transforming cities, their built environments and social and political infrastructures, especially in small and rapidly growing cities located in the peripheries of nation‐building projects. In my research I explore the case of one patron in Granada, a rapidly urbanizing city in Colombia that received many forced migrants between 1990 and 2010, to reveal a new way in which city building and patron–client relationships co‐evolve and are constituted within a space of intimate interactions between landed property and urban real estate.
This paper contributes to critical and Southern urban studies by discussing how the notion of hybridity is useful to understand contemporary modes of politics rooted in equality pursuits and crafted by peripheral subjects. It analyses the birth, discourses and tactics of three grassroots groups in Rocinha, an immense peripheral settlement in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to show how modern insurgent claims – based on material urban rights – are intertwined with other grammars of justice, such as the politics of intersectional difference, critical pedagogies, solidarity and care. These cases suggest that contemporary insurgency builds on rights-based citizenship claims to create unique pathways that somehow articulate the universality and relationality of justice. I suggest that hybrid insurgent citizenship operates like a braid in which different strategies are uniquely and interdependently linked over time. Whilst in Rocinha the central thread is insurgency, the same logics could apply to other context-situated political traditions.
The article illustrates the reemergence of the Atlantic Forest biome in Morro da Babilônia, a favela in Rio de Janeiro, due to a reforestation project started in the 1980s conducted by institutional actors and the local community. The forest has played an important role in reinvigorating the sense of community, by legitimizing ownership claims that the community has made over the area, and by serving as a mitigation strategy in a context of increasing climatic-extreme events. In 2019 a team of researchers started an oral history project to document the social and environmental transformation of the favela. Interviews with members of the community and representatives of institutional partners opened up unexpected paths into people's memories and perspectives. In a frame of socioeconomic, political and environmental violence, injustice, and vulnerability, the making of a multispecies city and its related narratives turned out to be instrumental for the community's survival.
Resumo O presente artigo tem como objetivo debater e explorar os novos ativismos em favelas, cujo foco se posiciona na história, na cultura e na identidade desses territórios. Argumentamos aqui que, diferentemente do tradicional ativismo urbano comumente abordado na literatura (focado em demandas de natureza material), os novos ativismos buscam adicionar, a essas lutas, uma disputa pela narrativa sobre o território. Exploramos essas manifestações à luz de debates sobre a transição conceitual da cidadania e sobre identidades interseccionais. Especialmente, questionamos a existência de uma suposta identidade de favelado na qual os discursos e narrativas hegemônicas sobre a cidade, ora podem ser reproduzidos, ora podem ser subvertidos e utilizados na construção de lutas e ativismos urbanos insurgentes.
Resumo O presente artigo tem como objetivo debater e explorar os novos ativismos em favelas, cujo foco se posiciona na história, na cultura e na identidade desses territórios. Argumentamos aqui que, diferentemente do tradicional ativismo urbano comumente abordado na literatura (focado em demandas de natureza material), os novos ativismos buscam adicionar, a essas lutas, uma disputa pela narrativa sobre o território. Exploramos essas manifestações à luz de debates sobre a transição conceitual da cidadania e sobre identidades interseccionais. Especialmente, questionamos a existência de uma suposta identidade de favelado na qual os discursos e narrativas hegemônicas sobre a cidade, ora podem ser reproduzidos, ora podem ser subvertidos e utilizados na construção de lutas e ativismos urbanos insurgentes.
Este artigo pretende colocar em perspectiva histórica o papel exercido pelo mercado de aluguéis na expansão das favelas, assim como na formulação de políticas públicas. Apesar da ausência de dados sobre este mercado, é possível constatar que não se trata de uma realidade recente. Ao contrário, o mercado de aluguéis é, desde o início do século XX, um problema público no Rio de Janeiro. O presente trabalho constata, inicialmente, a existência de aluguéis desde o início das favelas. Posteriormente, analisará o processo de criminalização da cobrança de aluguéis a partir do Código de Obras de 1937. Por fim, abordará as questões suscitadas pelo mercado de aluguéis no contexto dos projetos de regularização fundiária a partir dos anos 1980.
Las favelas cariocas han sido escenario de recientes cambios urbanos relacionados con las actividades turísticas, en especial ligadas a los grandes eventos deportivos, como la Copa del Mundo de 2014 y los Juegos Olímpicos y Paralímpicos de 2016. La visita por brasileños y extranjeros siempre ha sido expresiva en la ciudad, y el aumento del movimiento en las favelas es un hecho relevante. El presente artículo es parte de investigación que viene mapeando los impactos de las obras de movilidad urbana en favelas Rio de Janeiro, de las políticas de seguridad a través de las Unidades de Policía Pacificadora (UPP) y sus reflejos en el turismo y en la imagen de esas áreas de la ciudad. El trabajo pasó a enfocar el estudio de favelas en la Zona Sur, de mayor actividad turística. La investigación ha mapeado albergues, bares, restaurantes, parques y senderos turísticos, buscando datos como sus ubicaciones, quiénes son los emprendedores, de qué manera están insertos en el turismo en favelas y la importancia de la participación comunitaria y de las políticas públicas en el proceso, buscando entender si las transformaciones han causado gentrificación en esas comunidades.
In this article we address a recent tendency in development policies to engage actors beyond the nation-state, such as corporations, NGOs and other less formalized and local authorities. Many scholars have started questioning, at both the empirical and analytical level, the distinction between state and non-state actors, especially in the context of the governance of natural resources and security. Here, drawing from our case studies in Kingston (Jamaica) and Nairobi (Kenya), where security is provided, respectively, by gangs and by a residents' policing organization, we attempt to understand the mutual entanglement of these actors through the concept of hybrid governance arrangements. We suggest that the added value of the hybridity approach lies exactly in the blurring of lines between the different actors involved. © 2016 European Association of Development Research and Training Institutes.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, proclamations rang out that gentrification had gone global. But what do we mean by 'gentrification' today? How can we compare 'gentrification' in New York and London with that in Shanghai, Johannesburg, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro? This book argues that gentrification is one of the most significant and socially unjust processes affecting cities worldwide today, and one that demands renewed critical assessment.
Drawing on the 'new' comparative urbanism and writings on planetary urbanization, the authors undertake a much-needed transurban analysis underpinned by a critical political economy approach. Looking beyond the usual gentrification suspects in Europe and North America to non-Western cases, from slum gentrification to mega-displacement, they show that gentrification has unfolded at a planetary scale, but it has not assumed a North to South or West to East trajectory the story is much more complex than that.
Rich with empirical detail, yet wide-ranging, Planetary Gentrification unhinges, unsettles and provincializes Western notions of urban development. It will be invaluable to students and scholars interested in the future of cities and the production of a truly global urban studies, and equally importantly to all those committed to social justice in cities.
As marginalized neighborhoods benefit from cleanup and environmental amenities often brought by municipal sustainability planning, recent trends of land revaluation, investments, and gentrification are posing a conundrum and paradox for environmental justice (EJ) activists. In this article, I examine the progression of the urban EJ agenda—from fighting contamination to mobilizing for environmental goods and resisting environmental gentrification—and analyze how the EJ scholarship has reflected upon the complexification of this agenda. I argue that locally unwanted land uses can be reconceptualized from contamination sources to new green amenities because of the displacement they seem to trigger or accelerate.
We examine the current 'datafication' process underway in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and the power shifts it is creating in the field of international development. The use of new communications and database technologies in LMICs is generating 'big data' (for example from the use of mobile phones, mobile-based financial services and the internet) which is collected and processed by corporations. When shared, these data are also becoming a potentially valuable resource for development research and policy. With these new sources of data, new power structures are emerging within the field of development. We identify two trends in particular, illustrating them with examples: first, the empowerment of public-private partnerships around datafication in LMICs and the consequently growing agency of corporations as development actors. Second, the way commercially generated big data is becoming the foundation for country-level 'data doubles', i.e. digital representations of social phenomena and/or territories that are created in parallel with, and sometimes in lieu of, national data and statistics. We explore the resulting shift from legibility (Scott, 1998) to visibility, and the implications of seeing development interventions as a byproduct of larger-scale processes of informational capitalism.
Under contemporary capitalism the extraction of value from the built environment has escalated, working in tandem with other urban processes to lay the foundations for the exploitative processes of gentrification world-wide. Global gentrifications: Uneven development and displacement critically assesses and tests the meaning and significance of gentrification in places outside the ‘usual suspects’ of the Global North. Informed by a rich array of case studies from cities in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Southern Europe, and beyond, the book (re)discovers the important generalities and geographical specificities associated with the uneven process of gentrification globally. It highlights intensifying global struggles over urban space and underlines gentrification as a growing and important battleground in the contemporary world. The book will be of value to students and academics, policy makers, planners and community organisations.
Major social and political transformations such as the shift towards neoliberal urban policies have widely altered the contemporary structuring of metropolitan areas in Spain and Latin America. One key consequence is the recapture of city centres by wealthy tenants and the eviction of poorer households, a phenomenon usually designated by the term gentrification. In comparison to the comprehensive documentation of gentrification in the Anglophone environment, few scholars have paid attention to this phenomenon in this area of the world so far. This article responds to this gap, providing an exhaustive revision of the debates about gentrification occurring in Spain and Latin America during the last decade and tracking two theoretical motivations. First, it stresses the necessity of characterizing gentrification discourses in Spain and Latin America, preparing a conceptual appropriation and contextualization of the term itself. Second, it confirms that gentrification in Spain and Latin America varies substantially from processes observed in the Anglophone world. As a result, the review develops insights into emancipating and challenging debates that remain useful for the mainstream gentrification discourse too. Addressing this, it proposes a reconsideration and repoliticization of gentrification through the territorial and linguistic lens of Spanish and Latin American researchers.
As the curtains are drawn in London's East End, Brazil and Rio de Janeiro will be under the international spotlight over the next four years. This paper focuses on the process of Olympic city-making in the West End of Rio de Janeiro, where the planning and construction of facilities and transport network have adversely affected low-income settlements. The planning of the Olympic Park has become the latest episode in a series of attempts to drive out one of the longest established poor settlements in the borough of Barra da Tijuca. Attention is given to the changing discourse justifying the relocation and the context in which residents have resisted eviction. In another case study, the paper considers the construction of Bus Rapid Transit corridors aimed to improve access to the area. In this instance, some communities were not able to avoid eviction, being relocated to the western edges of the city or financially compensated. Analysis of the eviction process is drawn from material collected by visiting the affected communities. The paper concludes by reflecting on the inexorability of Olympic city-making and entitlement to the emerging geographies.
This article examines the role of sporting mega-events in the reconfiguration of the urban landscape, to understand some of their impacts upon social groups directly affected by large projects involved in the construction of the so-called ‘Olympic City’. It studies the case of Rio de Janeiro, which will host the 2014 football World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. The article seeks to demonstrate how mega-events are being instrumentalized by local political and economic elites, especially by a coalition of ambitious civic leaders, private entrepreneurs, and local real estate interests, who exploit the event-related sense of urgency, mobilization, and consensus in order to remake the city in their own image. Through the study of a series of projects conceived with the mega-events deadline in mind, and with a special emphasis on Porto Maravilha’s port revitalization project, the article shows how such an event-led planning model fosters an exclusive vision of urban regeneration. It sustains that such vision can open the way for the state-assisted privatization and commodification of the urban realm, and promote the rise of a new, ‘exceptional’ form of neo-liberal urban regeneration in the Latin American landscape, which serves the needs of capital while exacerbating socio-spatial segregation, inequality and social conflicts.
This article seeks to present part of the reflections made in my doctoral thesis, in which I analyze the meanings of the revival of practices and discourses about the "removal" of favelas in Rio de Janeiro today. This paper will discuss one of the constituent dimensions of what I call "repertoire of removing" the "legacy" that will achieve the mega sports events that the city will host (the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics). The current urban interventions are resulting in significant changes in the flows and uses of city space, causing even the displacement of some residents of slums. This process has been translated by the public authorities involved, as well as in relation to other interventions, such as a "legacy" allowed for achieving these mega events. This configuration represents an important alteration in the conformation of the "slum problem" at this conjuncture.
This paper revisits the ‘geography of gentrification’ thinking through the literature on comparative urbanism. I argue that given the ‘mega-gentrification’ affecting many cities in the Global South gentrification researchers need to adopt a postcolonial approach taking on board critiques around developmentalism, categorization and universalism. In addition they need to draw on recent work on the mobilities and assemblages of urban policies/policy-making in order to explore if, and how, gentrification has travelled from the Global North to the Global South.
This article argues against the allegedly inter-contextual character of gentrification within the new gentrification research agenda. The main argument is that gentrification is a concept highly dependent on contextual causality and its generalized use will not remove its contextual attachment to the Anglo-American metropolis. The second argument is that looking for gentrification in increasingly varied contexts displaces emphasis from causal mechanisms to similarities in outcomes across contexts, and leads to a loss of analytical rigour. The third argument refers to the ideological and political impact of equating ‘gentrification’ with, and projecting its neoliberal frame on, the different forms of urban regeneration across various geographical and historical contexts. As gentrification becomes quasi synonymous with urban regeneration, it becomes less useful to the analysis of urban socio-spatial change and, since the use of this term seems no longer avoidable in academic and broader discourse, its implicit contextual assumptions should be constantly exposed.
Information about unplanned settlements in developing cities is often unavailable, despite their extent, which at times can dominate residential land-use. This research aims to contribute to the development of tools for monitoring such areas, by using spatial metrics as means for the identification of the morphology of unplanned urban settlements in VHR images. The methodology is tested in two case study areas: Dar es Salaam and New Delhi. The methodology builds on using image segmentation and on the assumption that segments representing homogenous urban patches are different in planned and unplanned areas. The morphological aspects (size, density and layout pattern) of planned and unplanned areas are analyzed using spatial metrics on segmented images. A final set of metrics has been used to build an unplanned settlement index’. Comparison between results and land use data showed that the index can assist in the identification of unplanned settlements.
Moving beyond the usual Anglo-American examples of gentrification this book investigates the pronouncement of a global gentrification. Drawing on, yet critiquing, the ideas of comparative urbanism it asserts that there are global gentrifications. Like variegated neoliberalism, there are variegated gentrifications around the globe that are the result of uneven development and that cause the displacement of the poor. The collection delivers on promises made by other gentrification scholars, who have outlined the need for a truly cosmopolitan, global, view of gentrification, even if the editors recognise that such a cosmopolitan view is not easy to obtain.
This book describes the work of homicide detectives in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. In the midst of violence, detectives investigate two types of crimes—homicide and the routine killings of citizens by police known as resisting arrests followed by death. These two types of violence relay two different logics of killing, one on the part of an organized crime group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital or PCC, and the other of a state broadly supportive of highly lethal police. This book tracks the ways that these two logics of killing and their subjects of violence align in moral and practical terms. This alignment reveals a system of governance in which who can live and who can die is largely defined by a de facto and mutually observed consensus between the state and the PCC, most intensely felt in the informally urbanized parts of the city. And yet that consensus can itself be killed, breaking apart into moments of acute and violent crisis in the city in which police and supposed PCC affiliates are killed by each other with near abandon. São Paulo's cyclical pattern of violence, which has long periods of relative peace punctuated by violent crisis, is rooted in the empirical practice of sovereignty by consensus that is deeply connected to the two prominent pressures of the contemporary moment, namely, security and democracy.
In recent years, urban governance has become increasingly preoccupied with the exploration of new ways in which to foster and encourage local development and employment growth. Such an entrepreneurial stance contrasts with the managerial practices of earlier decades which primarily focussed on the local provision of services, facilities and benefits to urban populations. This paper explores the context of this shift from managerialism to entrepreneurialism in urban governance and seeks to show how mechanisms of inter-urban competition shape outcomes and generate macroeconomic consequences. The relations between urban change and economic development are thereby brought into focus in a period characterised by considerable economic and political instability.
In this article we argue that the pacification of strategic Rio de Janeiro favelas is a case of what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession, allowing for capital accumulation at multiple scales. Drawing on multi-year participant observation, we seek to show the particular form that this process takes as it works through Rio's social and spatial structures. Unlike the mass removals of the 1960s and 1970s, favela families have more recently been displaced through a process of thinning, in the context of a neoliberal development programme centred on a series of mega-events. Removal is carried out through a combination of threats, promises, disinformation, and the intentional generation of insecurity that together constitute a form of psychological terror.
Introduction
On the iconic promenade of Copacabana beach, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is an outdoor market selling clothing, artwork and various tchotchkes to tourists. Embodied in these wares is Rio's cultivated visual vocabulary in miniature: Christ the Redeemer shelf ornaments, Sugarloaf Mountain key chains, artwork inspired by the city's natural splendour, and other commodifications of the images that have long attracted Brazilians and foreign tourists to this city. However, contemporarily, a new image has joined the jumble: paintings of the haphazard favelas on Rio's hillsides are on offer next to those depicting the city's natural splendour and cultural iconography. The Brazilian favela – historically stigmatised as an urban slum and a national embarrassment of poverty and marginalisation incarnate – has begun to be admitted, at least on canvas, to the city's esteemed milieu.
Favelas themselves have come a long way over their 100 years of existence as an informal style of habitation. At one time, these scattered settlements comprised wood or wattle-and-daub shacks, housing economic migrants from other regions of Brazil. Now, no longer properly termed a ‘squatter settlement’ or a ‘slum’, favelas have evolved, through the organic process of accretion and collective community building, into consolidated urban villages built of masonry and reinforced concrete. Levels of income, investment and condition vary widely, but households with sufficient means have improved their homes with modern interiors and furnishings. Utilities and other services can be procured informally and recently, in some cases, through formalised relationships with suppliers. Tenurial security is codified in a patchwork of legislation and constitutional guarantees, and informal property markets are robust.
Social attitudes towards favelas in the Brazilian mainstream are also becoming less crudely formed. Political majorities in this class-stratified society are warming to the idea of the social inclusion of the marginalised and the dispossessed, and a set of ongoing policy initiatives at the municipal, state and federal levels, promoted under the theme of ‘social integration’, aim to introduce new regimes of security, connective infrastructure and/or urban services to some of these informal neighbourhoods. Piloted in the 1990s and intensified in anticipation of Brazil's hosting of two mega-events – the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in 2014 and the Summer Olympic Games in 2016 – these programmes reassert state sovereignty over what was once generally assumed to be provisional but ultimately irredeemable typologies of habitation.
For all of Brazil's efforts to reduce poverty-and its progress-the favelas in Rio de Janeiro still house one-third of the city's poor, and violence permeates every aspect of the city. As urban drug gangs and police wage war in the streets, favela residents who are especially vulnerable live in fear of being caught in the crossfire. Politicians, human rights activists, and security authorities have been working to minimize the social and economic problems at the root of this "war." Living in the Crossfire presents impassioned testimony from officials, residents, and others in response to the ongoing crisis. Maria Helena Moreira Alves and Philip Evanson provide vivid accounts from grieving mothers and members of the police working to stop the war and, among officials, from Brazil's President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, who discusses his efforts to improve public security.
Introduction Foucault's Boomerang: Colonies Come Home Surveillant Economy Urban Achilles Virtual-Citizen-Soldiers References
Gentrification, a process of class neighbourhood upgrading, is being identified in a broader range of urban contexts throughout the world. This book throws new light and evidence to bear on a subject that deeply divides commentators on its worth and social costs given its ability to physically improve areas but also to displace indigenous inhabitants. Gentrification in a Global Perspective brings together the most recent theoretical and empirical research on gentrification at a global scale. Each author gives an overview of gentrification in their country so that each chapter retains a unique approach but tackles a common theme within a shared framework. The main feature of the book is a critical and well-written set of chapters on a process that is currently undergoing a resurgence of interest and one that shows no sign of abating. © 2005 Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge, selection and editorial material; individual chapters, the contributors. All rights reserved.
This commentary sets out to make a claim for gentrification to be understood from the Global East. I argue that a regional approach to gentrification can nurture a contextually informed but theoretically connected comparative urbanism, contributing to the comparative urbanist project by providing an appropriate point of contact between local context and universalising theories. In the process, I attempt to partially destabilise the concept of gentrification and then re-centre it in the Global East. Any comparative exercise is not a straightforward process; on the contrary, it is fraught with epistemological, theoretical and methodological stumbling blocks – regions are slippery and often diverse; diversity can be hard to bottle and label along theoretical lines; methods work more smoothly in discrete settings. But it is an exercise worth undertaking; the regional is the middle stratum that allows the locally specific to speak to planetary trends, and planetary trends to find local purchase. In the pages that follow I map out a number of recognisable types of gentrification in East Asia. I then use these to transcend the region and cut across the Global North / Global South binary that bedevils so much theory-making. The aim, addressed specifically in the final section, is to use these claims for gentrification in the Global East to speak back to and, hopefully, enrich urban theory-making and contribute to discussion of what is becoming known as planetary gentrification (Lees et al., forthcoming).
In the neoliberal era, competing to host global sporting events has become a prominent urban promotion strategy, and with a few exceptions, the scholarly focus has been on the western experience. In contrast, this paper focuses on the south experience with specific reference to the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa and the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. A common argument is that such sporting events provide global marketing opportunities that can attract foreign investment, which may serve as catalysts for development. A key goal is to promote the status and power of the post-colonial nation-state (although ironically ceding sovereignty to entities like FIFA for the duration of events). While there are some benefits, especially in terms of infrastructure development, the Indian, Brazilian and South African experience suggests that the privileged tend to benefit at the expense of the poor, and socio-economic inequalities were exacerbated. These points are illustrated in this paper with reference to evictions, loss of livelihoods and violations of human rights. Disturbingly, the cost of constructing new sports’ facilities and associated infrastructure escalated phenomenally from the original bid-document estimates, without any public oversight, and some are destined to be white elephants. The mega-events were largely organised and funded by the governments in consultation with the private sector, with little or no accountability to citizens, although such decisions had major implications in terms of the diversion of public spending priorities from more urgent social needs such as housing, healthcare and education.
This article considers the underlying dynamics of the elite-oriented urban transformation that Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, has undergone during the past decade and a half. It begins by drawing a cross-historical comparison between Managua's metropolitan makeover and a paradigmatic case of planned urban change, that of 19th-century Parisian Haussmannization, in order to highlight the systemic and purposeful nature of the former's transformation from a top-down perspective. It then focuses ethnographically on the grassroots consequences of specific instances of infrastructural development that have affected two poor neighbourhoods in the city, providing a bottom-up view on the way that these have constituted the poor communities as 'pacified spaces', to the extent that their inhabitants can be said to have internalized a form of 'abject urbanism' that actively contributes to sustaining the unequal spatial order of the city. When seen from this perspective, the planned urban transformation of Managua emerges as a systemic form of violence mediated by the workings of infrastructure, a process that I suggest can be termed 'infrastructural violence'. © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.
Public space is partly what makes cities, and as such it has been at the core of urban studies and many disciplines ranging from sociology, geography, political science, anthropology to planning, architecture, design and philosophy. As one of the most multidisciplinary journals in the field, Urban Studies has been instrumental in exposing the controversies of public space during its 50 years of publication. A careful search through the archives of the journal, however, reveals that this interest has been rather uneven. While in the period before the 1990s a mere six articles dealt with aspects of public space, there has been a remarkable upsurge since then, which resulted in close to 300 articles. Somewhat paradoxically, the widely pronounced death of public space in the early 1990s thus marked the beginning of an extended debate on the topic of public space itself. This Virtual Special Issue (VSI) sets out to reinvigorate the debate once more in a critical synthesis of the important points that set the terms of the discussion and still reverberate in urban studies, by hoping to inspire new directions which touch on many disciplines. Using the death of public space as a counterpoint, the introductory article by Judit Bodnar reflects on the ‘life’ of public space, its cycles, forms and locations. It reviews the intellectual history of the main controversies that have kept discussions of public space alive, and further argues that attention to tensions, variations and comparisons can both reorient some of the fundamental questions of the debate itself and suggest research agendas for the future. The collection of 15 articles reflects first on the nature and specificity of public space, its historicity, its relationship to democratic politics, and then continues with the discussion of the most contested issues in the contemporary transformation of public space - privatisation, commercialisation and securitisation. Geographical diversity in the collection is not a mere gesture of politeness in a confessedly Western/Northern-dominated urban scholarship; nor is it simply driven by a desire to state that there are differences in the way public space is conceived of and operates in various places. Thinking about informality in Latin America, state and class in India, commercialisation in Vietnam, or security in other than North American ‘Western’ cities is meant to disrupt general urban theory and the public-private distinction.
Downtown Los Angeles is undergoing a transformation from concentrated disadvantage to vibrant city center. Using ethnographic research conducted in the gentrifying Historic Core of Los Angeles, I find that the presence of some original residents is encouraged as they help create the gritty and risky atmosphere valued by the new urbanites moving to the area who equate poverty with authenticity in a form of poverty fetishism. I focus here on a subsection of the low-income downtown population, who I call “urban mascots," whose value lies in their ability to embody stereotypical attributes of poverty. I create a typology of urban mascots based on the type of interactions they are willing to have with those seeking experiences with urban poverty. In the end, I argue that urban mascots provide the new gentrifying residents with a cast of nonthreatening and charismatic characters who represent for them a consumable authentic urban experience.
This paper examines the relationship between spectacle and worlding. Using Dharavi as the site (cite) of analysis, the paper considers how slum tours, art and television documentaries produce particular narratives and imaginaries of the slum. We move beyond the discussions of voyeurism and the aestheticisation of poverty and suggest that the knowledge of the slum is entangled with the motives, preconceptions and experiences of multiple actors, giving the slum a relation with the “world” that holds opportunities to disrupt hegemonic views of urbanism, while centering its own position as a locus of knowledge on urban poverty. The paper suggests that analysing the spectacle of the slum through the lens of worlding offers ways to think critically of how urban space is reordered and urban knowledge is produced and circulated.
Why have neoliberal economics and populist politics coexisted in several Latin American and East European countries but not in others? This article analyzes three commonalities between neoliberalism and populism. First, both populist leaders and neoliberal experts have an adversarial relationship to parties and intermediary organizations. Populists see them as fetters on their personal latitude, while neoliberals condemn them as rent-seekers. Second, populists and neoliberals concentrate power at the apex of the state to boost their personal leadership and enact painful reforms. Finally, populists and neoliberals see the deep crisis facing their countries as an opportunity, for populists to prove their charisma and for neoliberals to discredit the state-interventionist development model. Party weakness, a powerful presidency, and a deep crisis in combination are preconditions for the rise of neoliberal populism.
This article addresses the question of whether and how participation in government promotes the conditions for participants to engage in the open-ended and public-minded discussion heralded by democratic theorists. Ethnographic evidence shows how participants in assemblies of the "participatory budget" in the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil, created open-ended and public-minded discussion in two of the city's poor districts. The urban poor of Latin American have often been treated as unlikely candidates for democratic engagement, but in these meetings participants regularly carved out spaces for civic discourse and deliberation, deploying a language of the commonality of needs as a vocabulary of public interest. In a district with organized networks of civil society, experienced community activists played an important role in curtailing conflict, while in a district without such networks, the assemblies were severely disrupted at times by virtue of being the "only place in the community" that could serve as a staging ground for some participants to manage their reputations. A comparison with a prior period in both districts shows that before the budgeting assemblies were created it was difficult to sustain any kind of regular meeting place beyond individual neighborhoods to carry out these discussions. The notion of the "public sphere" is broadened, calling for a revision of the stark separation of state and civil society in democratic theory.
How has Brazil's civil society shaped the institutional framework for new policymaking venues? Institutionalism and civil society theories offer partial explanations of institutional innovations under the current democratic regime. The concept of participatory publics can overcome the limitations of each approach and can demonstrate how the expansion of Brazil's civil society led to the creation of participatory, deliberative policymaking institutions. Participatory publics comprise organized citizens who seek to overcome social and political exclusion through public deliberation, accountability, and implementation of their policy preferences. Participatory budgeting in the municipalities of Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, and Recife shows how civil society organizations and political reformers interact to implement new policymaking systems.
This essay examines the intersection of environmental justice activism and state‐sponsored sustainable urban development—how is environmental justice activism enabled or disabled in the context of rapid urban development, consensual politics and the seemingly a‐political language of sustainability? Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, I define a process I refer to as “environmental gentrification,” which builds on the material and discursive successes of the environmental justice movement and appropriates them to serve high‐end development. While it appears as politically‐neutral, consensus‐based planning that is both ecologically and socially sensitive, in practice, environmental gentrification subordinates equity to profit‐minded development. I propose that this process offers a new way of exploring the paradoxes and conundrums facing contemporary urban residents as they fight to challenge the vast economic and ecological disparities that increasingly divide today's cities.
The article consists of an ethnographic analysis of the favela consolidation in contemporary Rio de Janeiro, understood here as a result of the juxtaposition of two seemingly contradictory socio-historical processes: (1) the replacement of favela removal programs by urbanization programs and projects, giving rise to a recent construction boom in the favelas and to an unprecedented commoditization of their space; (2) the appropriation of the space of the favelas by the drug trade, which (re)produces and reinforces the physical, social, and symbolic boundaries between the favela and the so-called "asphalt." This context is explored through a conception of the house as a total social fact: the transition from the stucco shack to the masonry house (increasingly converted into a "fortress") renders the space of the favela and particularly of the house as process, future project, and a source of value, both economic and subjective.
This article examines the transferability of the concept of gentrification away from its Anglo-American heartland to the cities of Asia Pacific and specifically Hong Kong. An epistemological argument challenges such theoretical licence, claiming that conceptual overreach represents another example of Anglo-American hegemony asserting the primacy of its concepts in other societies and cultures. Past research suggests that if gentrification exists in Asia Pacific cities it bears some definite regional specificities of urban form, state direction and, most surprising from a Western perspective, a potentially progressive dimension for some impacted residents. Closer examination of urban discourse in Hong Kong is conducted through analysis of English and Chinese language newspapers. In both instances, gentrification is barely used to describe the pervasive processes of urban redevelopment, which otherwise receive abundant coverage. Interviews with local housing experts confirm the marginality of gentrification in academic and public discourse, and the power of a local ideology that sees urban (re)development unproblematically as a means of upward social mobility. However, in the decade-long housing bust after 1997, growing inequality has encouraged a nascent class analysis of the property market, an ontological awakening that may prove more favourable to the identification of gentrification in an Asia Pacific idiom.
This special issue seeks to return the urban to the heart of planning theory. In doing so, it has three objectives. Firstly, it highlights particular urbanisms: how they are produced, lived and negotiated, from New York to Bogota. The articles thus draw attention to the multiplicity of urbanisms that constitute the contemporary world system, thereby disrupting the rather restricted analytics of global cities and world cities. Secondly, the articles pay careful attention to the forms of worlding at work in such urbanisms, demonstrating how the production of the urban takes place in the crucible of modernizing projects of development, regimes of immigration and governance and experiments with neoliberalism and market rule.Thirdly, this special issue seeks to explore the implications of such research and analysis for the field of ideas currently constituted as planning theory. How does the study of urbanisms allow a rigorous understanding of planning as the organization and transformation of space? How can planning theory make sense of seemingly unplanned spaces that lie outside the grid of visible order? In what ways is planning itself a worlding practice, such that models, best practices, expertise and capital circulate in transnational fashion, creating new worlds of planning common sense?
